David Milch at the Writers Guild Foundation

Last week David Milch spoke as part of the Writers Guild Foundation's Spring Storytellers series. A lively evening with a fascinating guy.

Shawn over at Agents Are Evil said he'd have a recap up soon, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here are my random notes.

Process was the big initial topic. Milch says he writes for a certain number of hours per day, seven days a week. When pressed for the number, he guessed four.

He doesn't think about writing when he's not writing. He's not the guy jotting stuff down in the car, or having ideas while shaving. He noted that these thoughts are not true to his characters -- the ego suppression that happens while in the act of writing is not there when not writing, and drags down the characters' true voices.

Milch doesn't outline or do other conventional texty script preparations in advance of writing. He does massive amounts of research, from books to site visits to subject matter expert interviews. He wrote and published a sourced paper on the language of DEADWOOD, something I'd love to chase down and read.

The writing takes as long as it takes. Scenes often can be written or revised while in rehearsal or on set.

Of course, all this makes network programmers antsy. Even HBO, which Milch notes likes you to have your entire season in the can before you go to air.

He had a great quote about this which I'm going to butcher due to not transcribing it exactly, but it went something like: when the tao is gone, then talk of good and evil. Basically, his point was that effective storytelling is the essence. The airwaves are full of ineffective storytelling. In the absence of effective storytelling, networks make you stick to schedules.

Milch is amazingly present-focused -- the way he writes is testament to that. This trait also came up when he spoke about DEADWOOD, now heading into what's probably its final season (he was a little coy on the definites). He said that he and the others behind the show are doing all they can to make the show the best it can be, relishing that challenge and opportunity, and not thinking ahead to The End and aspects out of their control.

He suggested to the audience that we watch the show in the same vein, appreciating it in the moment and not looking ahead to when there are no more episodes.

Episode 9 is in post now, he said in passing.

Extremely articulate and lettered guy. Unpacked all kinds of references and allusions. Quoted from The Great Gatsby.

He won the prestigious Humanitas Prize. Twice. And bought a racehorse with the prize money. Twice.

Milch has survived multiple 12-step programs worth of demons: drugs, booze, depression, OCD. In college he wrote the same twelve pages of a novel by hand every day. All that is part of why he doesn't think about writing when he's not writing.

He doesn't type and doesn't know how to a use a computer, probably all the better since keyboard+mouse=bad bad OCD possibilities. Charmingly, he called the internet the "mainframe reboot" a few times. He also called his car keychain clicker a reboot.

Writing is not a solitary experience for him. He dictates to someone on a computer, with the words appearing projected on a screen (apparently the extras to the DEADWOOD DVDs show this -- must check that out). Also in the room are the other writers, students, friends.

Working with him must be a unique experience, and not just because in his more unhinged days he used to get into epic battles with his boss, including urinating on the boss's typewriter (to be fair, Milch said, the boss was not always at the typewriter at the time) and hurling the contents of the office out the window. The ST. ELSEWHERE staff, one floor below, were often distracted by random items plummeting past.

Milch once sold a novel to five different publishers.

He spun a really interesting thread around the racehorse Barbaro and that horrible break, using it to describe eliciting an authentic experience in an audience. With Barbaro, we the public had this infantile, kind of selfish fantasy about this horse winning it all.

Then the horse got hurt, and there was this repositioning of how we felt about it. We hoped the horse would be all right. Then, we learned that he might not be all right, but might in fact die -- the extreme ways that horses have been bred (for us) means poor circulation and frequent inability to recover from breaks. Then Barbaro was operated on, and was successful, and it seems like he will recover although not to be the champion he was.

Through this, Milch said, we the audience progressed from something experiencing something cliche to something genuine. I'm not capturing the detail fully, but trust me, it was an effective point.

His favorite $20,000 Pyramid category is Things That Go Inside Other Things (revealed when he knocked over a bottle of water).

He has a bad back and needs a lumbar support pillow for these events.

Director's chairs are not well-suited to lumbar support pillows.

In the Q and A, a guy referenced a lecture series Milch gave. Milch said it was available on the reboot, but after a quick search I've only been able to find a reference to it, not the DVD itself: it's called The Writer's Spirit: An Approach to Storytelling. Anyone know where it might be available?

He talked several times about the illusion of separateness that he -- and all of us -- experience, and the necessity of getting past this false isolation. We're so connected to the lives around us.

I see this coming out in how he lectures frequently and believes in teaching. I was also impressed at how gracious he was to everyone in the Q and A. Milch can no doubt be a tough sonofabitch (he ribbed the moderator, Paul Brownfield from the LA Times, on a few occasions), but he was warm and attentive to all who asked him questions.

Definitely worth going to hear him speak if you can. If just to hear the story that starts with him passed out in a Cuernavaca jail, missing the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and ends with him running down a New Haven street with a shotgun, blasting at cop cars...

Medium Well

I have a post about season finales in general percolating (I'm waiting for this week's final batch, particularly LOST) but can I just say now how much I liked last night's finale of MEDIUM?

It was an episode that was sort of an uber version of the norm, different and heightened, but that didn't have anyone act crazily out of character or undergo nutty stunt plotting.

Joe and Allison. Find me a more authentic depiction of a couple on TV these days. Their wonderful dynamic, spiky, touching, and sexy, lies at the heart of this show, and that took center stage here.

MEDIUM is quietly popular, not particularly fashionable for some reason, though the writing is first-rate -- a story editor friend on another show reports that no one wants to read MEDIUM specs.

I'm often amazed at how well it feeds both my sentimental and morbid streaks. COLD CASE, when it's clicking, does this too. I can pretty much be counted on to cry during every. Single. Closing. Montage.

And, yeah, the Dixie Chicks song was product placement, but it worked. Humming it now, in fact.

"How long do you wanna be loved? Is forever enough? Is forever enough?"

Waaah...

Daytime in the Nighttime

My UCLA TV writing class had a guest last night: John Loprieno, best know for starring as Cord Roberts on "One Life to Live." John's now a scriptwriter on the show, and talked to us about writing for daytime television, which is a whole different satchel of eels than writing for primetime.

The show's head writer devises the overall direction and arcs, which is then hashed out into episode breakdowns by the breakdown writers. Those documents, basically detailed beat sheets, then get handed off to the scriptwriters like John.

Every Monday the scriptwriters get their assignments, and they have until the following Monday to write the script, 85 pages. That's impressive right there, sheesh! 85 pages a week at minimum, more if the staff is trying to bank for the holidays. No revisions outside that week. The draft you hand in is what they shoot. The writers work one month ahead of air, and the show shoots two weeks ahead of air.

The writers that work quickly then have time to pursue other projects (John teaches and writes screenplays), and they live all over the country, another key difference from primetime. By John's account, it's a machine, but a great gig, the well-kept secret of professional screenwriting.

John had all kinds of stories about what episodes were hard to write (big party scenes), how happy the young studly actors are to have a guy writing dialogue they would actually say, and the challenge of dramatically getting characters from literal or emotional point A to B when the outline has been written by someone else, sometimes with huge or insufficient ground to cover.

You can't mess with the tags (act outs/act breaks in primetime parlance), likewise anything in bold. Stuff in bold comes from The Network. Ah, so network execs are a universal pain, whatever time of day you're writing for...

I'm intrigued to check out the format of the outlines and scripts, since daytime script layout is again something wholly different from primetime TV or film, utilizing the two-column format folks may've seen in other media (some computer game scripts use two-column).

Really interesting peek into a different sphere of writing.

And I resisted the entire time from squealing, "OMG, it's CORD ROBERTS!" I didn't even ask him what they thought when they switched Tinas. Discipline, people. It's all about discipline.

E3 Wrap Show

No risk of E3 going unblogged by all comers, so do check those out if you're seeking in-depth coverage. If you're looking for drive-by impressions, here are some random thoughts from my lone day roaming the floor.

I'm not a big swag-hunter, so undoubtedly there was cool stuff that folks were giving out that I missed. But the cleverest bit of swag I did see (and snag) was Microsoft Casual Games' "Serious Gamer's Disguise Kit," which contains an eyepatch and stick-on mustache for the Halo player in your life afraid to be caught playing Hexic.

Webzen polluted the show floor with blinky W necklaces. No way to wear one of those and not look like a knob.

Btw, I used to work on military simulation games and one year went to I/ITSEC, the simulation industry's national conference. It's like E3 but with real guns. Seriously, it was out of control. There was not one but several full-size HMMWV simulators, cockpits on gimbals, two-story MOUT installations.

The blinky items were the showstealer swag there too. Even if you're a buff military guy, in your pixelly desert camos and high and tight, blinky swag still makes you look like a knob.

And there are no booth babes at I/ITSEC. Anyone staffing a booth there could kill you with a cashew.

But I digress.

Webzen also gave out inflatable boogie boards, which people inexplicably pounced on. They then had to lug the thing around the rest of the day. If there's one thing that makes you look more like a tool than a blinky necklace, it's a flaccid plastic promotional boogie board strapped to your back.

I didn't have time to wait in line for anything, so I didn't see most of the prestige stuff that was hidden behind closed doors (sorry, Shawna, that means I missed Turok). I saw Will Wright demo Spore live at GDC last year, and EA already has my money for that title. Ship it!

I was curious about the Wii (who isn't?) but the line was beyond the pale. I was annoyed that they didn't even have anything about it that you could see without waiting in line like a (say it with me) knob, but I'm sure it's all out on the internets now.

Sony, by contrast, had loads of demo stations of the PS3, whose graphics are incredible. Really, HD is just mindblowing.

The PS3 games themselves, not so much with the blowing of minds.

Yeah, they all featured astonishing graphics, but we've seen all those games before. This was me, walking through the rows of PS3s and their 4-deep queues:

"Huh, a racing game."

"Huh, a WWII shooter."

"Huh, a fighting game."

"Huh-- OOH! Is that Okami over there on the PS2 aisle?!"

Okami is one of the few games I'm definitely going to play when it comes out. The gameplay promises to be inventive and intuitive, and the watercolor, calligraphic art shows what you can do with an "old gen" console if you're willing to *gasp* innovate.

Kentia Hall smells like ham.

A centerpiece of the Disney booth was the Pirates of the Caribbean section, which displayed a bunch of costumes and props from the second movie. Nifty.

I got a demo of the new PotC Online game, which is an MMO set in the world of the second movie. It uses the Toontown Online engine. The engine was designed for lower-end machines (smart), which works for cartoony shapes and basic textures, but completely fails to deliver the gritty, spooky, piratey goodness of the PotC movies.

PotC Online's stripped-down MMO play might work for mass market audiences for whom WoW is still too much, but the game looks flat and cheery and not at all a place where Jack Sparrow gets slapped by whores. Still, I signed up for the beta -- Toontown Online did a lot of interesting things well, and I'm curious about what lessons get applied here.

E3 attracts more and more of a marquee crowd these days, but my day was pretty light on the celebrity spotting. Admittedly I wasn't looking very hard. Apparently Paris Hilton was there and mangled the name of her own game, which is an easy laugh, but I'm sure the game's name changed a bunch of times in development. Dolphin, Gamecube? Revolution, Wii, anyone?

I did see Stan Lee, albeit at a distance. The crowd for Adam West (Family Guy game) was insane.

Oh, and I saw Michael Rooker. Homeboy was pacing around the Turbine booth. Is Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer more of a D&D Online man, or is Lord of the Rings Online more his style?

LOTRO actually looks pretty tight. Aion, a new addition to NCSoft's stable, also looks interesting, beautifully realized if not breaking a whole lot of new ground play-wise.

I spent most of my time around the online games, and was surprised at all the MMOs still trying to make a go of it. Sony Online had their own booth apart from the mega Sony mothership, with staffers desperately trying to interest passersby in EverQuest and Planetside. Not too many takers. Gods and Heroes might get an audience with its mythology meets Gladiator theme.

Ok, so you're Vanguard. You're a fantasy MMO looking down the all-enveloping maw of World of Warcraft. You gotta innovate to get some market share. What do you do? *Dennis Hopper voice* What. Do. You. Do?

I literally asked this of the booth guy (not in the Dennis Hopper voice), and he said that they'll let you have a mount by level 10. And that diplomacy with NPCs is one key new development of the game.

Yes, in Vanguard you'll have missions where you argue with a dock foreman NPC to get him to fire the dockworker NPCs. When you're not killing rats or their equivalent.

And, unfortunately, what I could see of Vanguard's visuals were subpar and the game framerate was chunking along on the Sigil booth's demo computers. Worse, I was told that the demoer had turned off a bunch of settings.

Here's hoping they can tune things up for their launch. The world is not a friendly place right now for elves in tights games without blockbuster IP or clever gameplay evolution or a new biz model.

I swear, going to E3 is like prepping for a hike. Bring a backpack and a bottle of water. Wear comfy shoes and dress in layers. Bring energy bars if you don't want to wait in a line 20 people deep for $7 nachos. I needed a nap at the end of the day.

And I missed out on a free massage! Next year...

FE3d Me, Seymour

E3 is here. Hide the children.

For the gaming news junkie, e3buzz can't be beat. It aggregates feeds from twenty-two (!) sources all in one page, with a separate recent headlines section. No pics, no video, just mainlined RSS. Ride it, gamer monkeys.

I'm going to be at E3 on Thursday, and the prospect fills me with equal parts happy anticipation and crankiness.

New games, new consoles, outrageous booth displays, random connections with friends from the biz = cool.

Struggling through a noisy, hot mosh pit of a convention floor swarming with swag-hungry, ill-mannered fanbois who somehow got a ticket even though they aren't in the industry and gape at booth girls like they've never seen Real Live Wimmins before = teh proverbial suxx0rz.

Wish me luck!

Them(e)'s the Breaks

I don't know about other writers of TV specs, but my enjoyment of watching the tube is tempered by a vague undercurrent of fear that a show I've spec'd will hit some story beat that I have in my own script.

That vague fear became a specific "Aw, crap" moment this week, as I saw on TV a story that's a ringer for one in a new spec outline I have in the works for that show. The story was similar enough in the broad strokes and even some eerie details that I don't think I can use mine in the spec, at least not in its current form.

I felt an oh so brief warm fuzzy for thinking in alignment with the show's writers, but that drowned in a cold bucket o' reality. I now have an outline with a hole in it.

So, what to do? It's one thing to murder your darlings, and another to have someone else suffocate them with a drycleaning bag.

Back to the theme!

The script's theme generated this particular story, and should be robust enough to spin out more. I hope.

Not every show on TV has themes, overtly stated or otherwise, but I find that the most compelling ones do. Those shows tend to convey a sense of larger meaning or human experience, beyond being only a series of events enacted by characters.

And, theme's a great safety net. If a scene won't play right, or your B story fails to click, check if it carries out the premise.

By falling in love with your theme rather than specific plot elements, spec writers faced with the moving target that is live TV may avoid having to off their true darlings and instead just have to maim those somewhat adorables.

Bad Places for Games

Operating rooms. Your surgeon's placed steel letters in your duodenum! Get an X-ray and unscramble the name of the life-saving prescription you need!

During an IRS audit. Two of the forms you've filled out are bogus, the third is real. You have ten questions to choose which before you're assessed bowel-shuddering damages and back payments!

The justice system. That waggish fanboy judge has hidden his name and a code in his ruling!

Just because you're a professional doesn't mean you need to act professional. Apparently. Ahem.

Future Historic Blunders in Marketing, Console Edition

The Nintendo Revolution has been renamed the Nintendo Wii.

Pronounced "we." Or, when translated into accountantese, "what drugs did they force-feed the focus group that approved this?"

Wii. Wii?

What the fiick?

Life Imitates GREY'S ANATOMY

No cute dedicated wife in red for this Hellraiser wannabe. He was high on meth when he attempted suicide. Yeah, sounds about right.

The Slow Burn

Sir Bruce has updated his MMOGChart with subscriber data through the end of 2005. Getting accurate numbers for these games is notoriously difficult, not leastly because different games/companies have different definitions of what exactly a subscriber or player is.

But one thing has been common to MMOG numbers for a long time: a game's biggest spike comes right after launch and tends to plateau or dip afterward, spiking again when a major expansion is released.

World of Warcraft is throwing off the curve in all kinds of ways, but a subtler revolution to this conventional wisdom may be unfolding with Second Life.

This anything-goes, DIY virtual world launched in 2003 and after a year had only about 10,000 users. Now, they're claiming 170,000 users and 20% growth a month.

Again, Second Life's definition of a user may include those who've created free accounts rather than subscribing, but with the real-currency-for-Linden-dollars market, that doesn't mean that those apparent freeloaders aren't paying customers.

The world (it's not really a game) has the benefit of a very engaged staff, regulars at industry conferences and events and on blogs, and much PR.

Not all of this PR is positive: folks are no doubt checking out Second Life for salacious reasons, following up on juicy press about virtual call girls and players' using custom avatars to role-play age-taboo fantasies.

Regardless, Second Life's healthy player base hasn't been the meteoric rise of some heavily-hyped MMOG, but has grown over time and shows no sign of slowing. Is this a sign of things to come for timelines to success for these games?

Edit: Puzzle Pirates is another one of these slow burn MMOGs. It's been out a few years and is steadily growing, faster now that they've launched an experimental and successful new business model. Both companies, Linden Labs for SL and Three Rings for PP, are lean organizations, privately held, and target the larger and more casual markets outside the typical MMOG hardcore. Maybe those elements are part of the slow burn recipe.

I Heart the LOST Prop People

Risotto or no, the Dharma Initiative drop-shipped some tweaked food. And I'm not even counting the two-gallon drums of ranch dressing.

Last week, Sawyer's Faux-reos had "FULLY HYDROGENATED" blaring across the label.

This week: Dharmalars! How great is that!

I'm picturing Mallomars, but more, y'know, inexplicable and sinister with references to Ambrose Bierce.

Spoofs and Synapses

Scribosphere made man Craig Mazin discusses comedy and neurosurgery.

Does this make him the McDreamy of parody movies?

The Tax Man, Yea-ah, I'm the Tax Man

Actually, I'm done with mine, but am reprinting another vintage Girls on Film article due to anticipated light posting for the next few days. Too much to write, not enough time.

Enjoy, and good luck with your W-2's and whatnot!

---

Nice Work If You Can Get It

It's lurking over there. On your desk. Your unfinished 1040 long form. Aaaiieee! Don't be scared. Procrastinate. In honor of tax season, here are two romantic comedies set in the workplace to keep you from itemizing your deductions for at least a few more hours.

1957's DESK SET features the classic pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Kate is Bunny Watson, head of the Federal Broadcasting Company's Reference Department. Staffed by extremely smart chicks, her office regularly fields inquiries on everything from baseball stats to "Song of Hiawatha," which Bunny can recite cold.

Peg (Joan Blondell) is the resident zaftig wisecracker, constantly tweaking Bunny about her sometime beau Mike Cutler (Gig Young). Network exec Mike takes Bunny very much for granted, but she's content for now. More or less.

Into this happily buzzing hive comes Tracy's Richard Sumner, an avuncular nutcase who turns out to be an efficiency expert. Uh oh. Armed with a degree from MIT and a tape measure, Richard gets underfoot as he makes plans to bring an "electronic brain" onto Bunny's home turf. Suddenly everyone's thinking pink slips. Despite this, our heroes begin to warm to each other. Richard, with his easygoing style and appreciation for intelligence and wit, has much more in common with Bunny than executron Mike.

The computer, when it arrives, is a massive blooping, blinking contraption more on the order of the bridge of the Enterprise than today's beige boxes. But not to fear, the reference staff neatly cleans its clock, as the vaunted machine confuses Corfu and "curfew," spewing punch cards hither and yon. It's a little surprising that IBM worked so closely with this film: not only do computers (temporarily) fulfill everyone's fears of being replaced, but they screw up royally at their first chance out of the gate. Just like Windows!

Another classic film couple star in 1940's HIS GIRL FRIDAY, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. You'll have to search a long time before you find a script this funny and sharp, delivered with such crackerjack timing.

Russell is Hildy Johnson, ace reporter. News flash for her editor and ex-husband Walter Burns (Grant): she's quitting to get married. Tomorrow. The groom-to-be is affable but dull insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), who wants to whisk Hildy away, far from press rooms and late editions. Worse, Hildy apparently wants to be so whisked.

Walter is none too happy to see her go: he hired a skywriter to announce, outside the divorce court, "HILDY -- DON'T BE HASTY -- REMEMBER MY DIMPLE." Grant has the charm cranked up to 11 as he keeps Hildy from getting on that train, mostly by repeatedly getting Bruce arrested. Walter is not going quietly into that Hildy-less night.

As great a role as Walter Burns is, Russell's got the real showcase part. Hildy is a reporter nonpareil, equally able to give the "woman's touch" (cough, whatever) to a story and physically tackle a fleeing interview subject. She's no fool, either, seeing through Walter's attempts to bollix her impending marriage. The one thing she doesn't see coming is how much she loves her work, and that she's incapable of giving it up. A breaking story about an impending execution puts her and Walter to the test, as they both find out what -- and who -- is most important to them.

The script goes beyond one-liners to deal with politics and corruption, and doesn't make any apologies for egregiously biased newspapers, or for the hyena-like behavior of cynical, misfortune-hungry reporters. HIS GIRL FRIDAY also sneaks in some in-jokes, such as Walter sending someone after Bruce, saying he looks like "that guy in the movies, Ralph Bellamy."

Why don't films like this get written or made anymore? For that matter, I don't know of two contemporary actors who could handle such material as well as Grant and Russell. They don't call those the golden days of Hollywood for nothing.

Now back to your Schedule ZX-1002 and Form 2p.4.L. The sooner you finish, the sooner you get your refund, the sooner you can blow it all on movie rentals. I know I will.

101 Greatest Screenplays

The WGA just announced its list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays of all time. The top five:

1. CASABLANCA
2. THE GODFATHER
3. CHINATOWN
4. CITIZEN KANE
5. ALL ABOUT EVE

Hard to argue with any of those. EVE in particular is one of my very favorites.

The list includes all sorts of genres (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK! WHEN HARRY MET SALLY! Yay!), focusing mainly on American films from the 30s to the present. Among contemporary honorees, Charlie Kaufman scores the hat trick with ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, and ADAPTATION all appearing.

There are about a dozen on the list I haven't seen. Time to hit Netflix!

Et Tube, Brute?

Entertainment Weekly had a recent TV-focused issue, which got me wondering.

What is the scribosphere watching? All you writers of features, TV, games, whatnot-- what's on your playlist? Here's mine:

Sunday
COLD CASE
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
GREY'S ANATOMY

Monday
PRISON BREAK
MEDIUM

Tuesday
THE UNIT

Wednesday
VERONICA MARS
LOST

Thursday
CSI

Friday
DR. WHO

Saturday
(None)

Shows not on currently that I'll watch for sure when they return:

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
DEADWOOD

There's also a couple of mid-seasoners I'll likely check out.

Whew! Way to put the miles on the ol' TiVo.

I'll occasionally watch the odd sitcom (MY NAME IS EARL, SCRUBS), but I'm clearly a drama girl.

Your turn. What do you watch? What's good that the rest of us might be missing?

'Tis the Season

The ever-entertaining and -informative Jane Espenson has on her blog the best and most complete reply yet to the classic TV writing question, "Just when the hell is staffing season?"

Guildy as Charged

In my wallet, nestled between my Tully's Coffee card and my Vons club card, is a shiny new WGA card.

Yes, wiseacres, it's even got my name on it.

While I haven't yet earned bona fide membership points, I did just join the WGA's New Media Caucus, which confers to non-WGA members a sort of observer nation status.

I can't vote, but I get the publications, can use the members section of the website, get script registration at the member rate, and can attend certain events. Hide the scotch, Craig, John, John, Paul, and company -- I'm coming.

Anyone out there who's written professionally for games or other types of creative digital projects, I suggest you check out the caucus as a great opportunity to connect with other writers of all media, and, in theory, abuse their open bars.

More nifty news is that I was accepted into the advanced workshop on writing TV spec pilots at UCLA Extension this spring. Woot!

I'm excited. It's a small class (fellow blogger Shawna among them), taught by Tom Blomquist, who has a slew of impressive credits on his CV including one of my favorite episodes of FARSCAPE.

Here's hoping for a productive spring for everybody!

Ronald D. Moore: "Building a Better Battlestar"

First off, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA really is as good as everyone says.

If you're not watching it yet, Netflix the miniseries and see for yourself. It's a drama set in a science fiction world, rather than being a sci fi drama, and the writing staff are fearless in their story choices, going for rich, authentic, and complicated over tidy, false, and cliche every time.

Ronald Moore was this year's keynote speaker for the Vision track of the Game Developers Conference. The connection between the hit Sci Fi Channel series and games might seem a bit tenuous, until you remember how many games are built on franchises or properties from other media. The GTA series got a sea-change facelift with GTA3; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time gave that franchise a kickstart.

Using "then" and "now" video clips for illustration, Moore outlined how, in creating the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series, he went back to the original show and broke down its elements to their fundamental architectural and dramatic purposes. Those elements then were altered or reinvented to fit the show's new, more realistic approach.

To quote from the speech's program description:

"Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of science fiction television. We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera – with its stock characters, techno double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics – has run its course and a new approach is required. That approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre...”
– Ronald D. Moore, the Battlestar Galactica Series Bible

My notes (and some SPOILERS, newbies!):

Premise - The Cylons' genocidal attack on the colonies and the desperate flight of the survivors. Pretty dark stuff. Genocide isn't fun. Moore wanted to keep the attack realistic and serious, in contrast to the laser-heavy 1978 scenes, and focus on how the assault is experienced by those living through it.

Family - The Adama family unit is central, but the family is less literal than in the original, more situational, and more rife with conflict. In the original, Adama's children are posted with him on Galactica (hardly realistic) and their relationship is strong and healthy. And boring.

Apollo - Brought onto Galactica with plenty o' baggage.

Commander Adama - Reframed as an active military man, fallible, with imperfect relationships with his children.

Zack - Still dead, but in a way that informs the current relationships.

Athena - Gone. But the daughter role is still there, occupied by someone else...

Roslin - Instead of an ineffectual, supporting-cast old man, the President is a very present woman, the fleet's mother figure, a balance and foil for Adama. She's also an emblem and reminder of the apocalypse: every time you see her you see someone who's in her position due to horrifying, cataclysmic events.

The government - Moore's impression of every Council of Twelve meeting:

COUNCIL: Let's trust the Cylons!

ADAMA: You're idiots!

Rather than a useless gathering of old guys in robes, the new Galactica's government is a civilization at war, with all the associated thorny problems and uprisings and sacrifices and making-do.

Starbuck - Adama's true daughter. Dirk Benedict's Starbuck -- a gambler and drinker who had problems with authority and slept around -- got by on charm and assured the audience that everything was going to be okay. The man lit his cigar off a Cylon's helmet in the credits, for Pete's sake!

So the new Starbuck? A gambler and drinker who has problems with authority and sleeps around. These, Moore says, when painted realistically are the characteristics of a very screwed up person. Starbuck is high-functioning in this military crisis environment because it's the only one in which she can function.

Tigh - Moore didn't want to write another Riker, the "I agree!" guy. In the real Navy (in which Moore served briefly; I'm a Navy brat me own self), the XO is the guy who makes you work. The CO is kinda lofty and you may not get to talk to him, but the XO is all up in your grill.

The XO, in short, is hated. Give that guy a drinking problem and buckle up. Tigh is also an indicator of Adama's fallibility: Adama cares for the people who serve with him, and has a blind spot to their flaws.

My additional two doubloons is that Tigh is far too old to still be an XO. The fact that the show opens with him still without his own command says something about his ability and career path.

Boomer - The original Boomer was a pretty boring utility player, just there to go on occasional missions or patrols. The new Boomer was intended to be young, naive, not yet super-proficient as a pilot, and in an inappropriate relationship with a noncom, someone more experienced and worldly. Boomer's a window for the audience into the story's new world. The decision to make Sharon a Cylon came, Moore said, after finishing the miniseries script. "You wanna know what'll make sure the series gets picked up?" Moore says David Eick asked him. They added the reveal at the miniseries' end without changing any of the previous scenes with her.

Cylons - The decision to make them look human was initially made in response to the limitations of TV. Given the expense, use of physical or digital effects would have to be severely constrained. Necessity's once again the mother of invention, and with human-looking Cylons we get all sorts of creative doors opened. Cylon social structures, cosmology... I particularly love the paranoia that pervades the series due to this one fact.

Baltar - Moore wondered, as I remember doing too, just why the hell the original Baltar betrayed the colonies. I mean, what was the point? In researching "Great Traitors in History," Moore learned that betrayals derive much less from ideology or abstract ideas than they do from the most concrete and base of motivations: (1) Greed and (2) Sex (money and women, in Moore's words).

The new Baltar is a smart, rich, accomplished man pleased with his place in the world, and susceptible to a female presence who bolsters those perceptions. "Yes, you're smart, yes, you're accomplished." So susceptible that he sells out the human race without even really noticing.

Vipers - The team thought these were cool as is, so they're in the new series largely unchanged.

SpaceCam - Moore said he found that unrealistic camera shots always brought him out of a story, such as the impossible tracking shot of the rocket lifting off in APOLLO 13. The fx crew on BATTLESTAR is directed to construct space scenes as if a real cameraman is there, placed realistically, and having to do things like refocus when shifting to a new depth of field and reacquire a subject lost while following.

Interiors - Real places where real people live and work. The CIC doesn't have some crazy pointless rotating platform or a highly vulnerable picture window, it's deep in the best-protected part of the ship.

And why, sci fi TV veteran Moore has repeatedly asked his production design folks, do people who live in space have pictures of space on their walls? None of that here. Personal mementos, yes, rugs, tapestries, yes. No nebulae prints.

The universe - The galaxies of BATTLESTAR are empty and lonely. Much less populated than in the original series. No space bars full of foxy alien dancers with more than the usual number of eyes. Without the "planet of the week" the story can turn inward and focus on the characters and their predicaments.

The search for Earth - Moore showed the two series' clips of Adama addressing the fleet about their new plan to find Earth. The scenes are quite similar, even down to the staging. The chief difference is that in the new series, Adama presents a lie, one told to preserve hope.

The talk ran long, but Moore graciously stuck around for a bit to answer a few questions. The only real interesting one asked how the episode's stories are structured. Moore said he looked to HILL STREET BLUES as an inspiration, and built the stories this way:

A - Weekly story, typically event/situation-driven
B - Story over 2-3 episodes, mostly focusing on character issues
C - Big season-long mythology, such as Season One's political explosion

Pretty frackin' good talk, I have to say.

GDC Wrap Show

A grab bag of thoughts from the Game Developers Conference, which just ended:

An interesting dichotomy of trends this year. The convergence between Hollywood IP and games emerged as one big theme (several sessions on writers and storytelling alone, in fact), with the burgeoning casual game industry the other. The big vs. the small.

A little odd/concerning to me that most of the casual game sessions were about the business side of things, rather than design thoughts and what makes a good casual game. A lot of starry-eyed developers seeing only shorter production cycles and lower start-up costs may be in for a nasty surprise when they try to unload the 300th knockoff of Bejeweled into the market.

I missed most of the keynotes this year except for Ronald Moore, who gave an excellent talk on reinventing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA which I'll write up in its own post.

It's no great hardship to miss the marquee sessions, really. Will Wright is always brilliant, and I heard interesting things about the PS3 and Nintendo speeches, but the keynotes are the most likely to get rebroadcast online and blogged six ways 'til Sunday.

Had to leave halfway through the Independent Games Festival/Game Developers Choice awards ceremony because I've been ill with some sort of pulmonary death phage (fine, a cold), but I knew I was at a hip videogame awards show and not some dusty old-media awards show because the model chick they had handing trophies to the presenters was in a blood-red cheongsam and had an armful of tattoos. Edgy!

The awards at this shindig are lucite blocks on a little arc of metal. Again, edgy! No twee hood ornaments here. Videogame awards look like something you could encode the human genome on and bury to later repopulate the planet should Armageddon come between clip montages.

Speaking of the genome, there must be something in our DNA that makes us incapable of correctly exiting a stage after accepting an award. Lots of that at this show too. Luckily there was Tattoo Girl to do that "this way, nimrod" arm-gesture thing.

The Darwinia guys wore tuxedos. A class act.

I saw Ronald Moore on the Expo floor a couple of times, talking to few enough people that I probably could've gotten in there and chatted for a bit. However, thanks to my pulmonary death phage I sound like a congested moose with a cough and I didn't want to be remembered to Mr. Moore as That Moose-Sounding Fangirl Who Gave Me Her Cold.

I'm getting worried about the size of GDC. The huge number of attendees makes it hard to move through the crowds of black-t-shirted devboys, sessions are slanting more toward general-interest topics, and hit overflow numbers quickly. A couple of sessions got started late because organizers had to herd us into a larger room. Nothing like last year's Will Wright Spore talk debacle, but things are getting bad.

The Expo floor is nowhere near E3 excess, but the elaborate booths and swag are headed in that direction. There were even some actual booth babes (gah), along with one waggish nod to same: a mannequin in t-shirt and baggy khakis with a laserprinted sign reading "BOOTH BABE" around her neck.

Latecomers to the boxed-lunch line were stuck with the vegetarian option and got very grumpy about not getting their chicken or roast beef sandwiches, which made me laugh. It's a sandwich. Grilled vegetables will not kill you.

Anyone wondering why the game industry has a hard time being taken seriously had only to stroll past the entries in the "Graphic Impact" concept art contest, fully 80% of which were improbably busty chicks. Some of them even had clothes on. Freud would've been bored out of his kopf, with all the large guns and menacing snakes in evidence.

I'm driving a really weird rental, a dumpling-shaped Ford that looks like a cut-rate clone of the PT Cruiser. The Boyfriend calls it the PT Loser. I call it the Ford Grub.

Saw bunches of Grubs in the San Jose Convention Center parking garage, which leads me to believe that Ford just dumped a whole fleet on Avis with a "we can't move these fuckers!" throwing up of hands.

I really hope Ernest Adams never stops giving his traditional final-day lecture. It's always thought-provoking and inspiring, and the perfect note to end the week on. This year he posited an interesting take on interactive stories, which I will also probably go into more detail on later.

Overall, a good year if a little thin on meaty sessions. The Austin Game Conference is definitely on the rise as a better, more leading-edge industry event, and it focuses on online.

The best part of GDC is reconnecting with industry friends and colleagues, some of whom I only see once a year. Fabulous to catch up with those of you I saw, and sorry I missed those of you I didn't. There's always next year. And E3. And Austin...

I Know the Way to San Jose

Headed up north later today for GDC. Catch y'all in a few days!

ARGs Go to the Big House

A pair of Spanish dotcom millionaires have opened a live prison break game inside an old bank in Madrid.

15 Euros gets you solving puzzles, ducking laser alarms, and clambering through metal ducting. Adventure game meets boot camp obstacle course, wrapped in a futuristic escape fiction.

Nifty, if lawsuit bait. I bet there's more than a few waivers you need to sign before hitting lockup.

I have a vague memory of a live ALIENS game in Europe -- Belgium? The Netherlands? -- where you and your ill-fated party ran around in subterranean tunnels chased by a guy in a rubber Alien suit. Anyone recall that?

What's particularly cool (to geeky me at least) about La Fuga is the database and positional tracking they use to see where all the "inmates" are inside the gamespace, and how this data is used to do things like change your future experience of the game. You might get tracked into a more difficult area the second time through, depending on how well you did on your first escape.

Now, all they need is the hot Wentworth Miller clones as extras! Maybe for the planned Times Square version?

So Not the Drama

Do we ever need to have another character anguish over his compatriot's prone, bloodied form, "Don't you die on me!"?

How about, after Bloody Guy dies, having Anguished Guy raise his tear-stained face to the heavens and yell, "Noooooooooo!"?

Yep, never.

Jane Espenson recently posted on comedy lines that are too shopworn to be funny anymore.

Allen B. Ury had a similar article in Fade In magazine's email newsletter about overdone dramatic motifs, such as the protagonist being dead but not knowing it, and the mentor who turns out to be eee-vil.

These two got me thinking about lines in non-comedies that have been so bled of impact through repetition that they need to be officially retired, if not set out on an ice floe to die.

In particular, the "Big No" is so knackered that it's even stale when satirized, but that doesn't stop filmmakers from going to its dried-out well. I'm looking at you, George Lucas. Vader yelling no at the end of Episode III only made the audience want to scream along with him.

Me, I can't stand "Can you zoom in on this area here?", which commits the double sin of being played-out and technologically wrong. I also think we need to find new ways of saying "What've we got?" when the cop/CSI/psychic detective shows up at a crime scene.

What are your (least) favorite overused dramatic lines? I bet you scriptreader types have a few...

Do You Like To Watch?

Last week Microsoft announced their 5000th patent, a system for enabling robust spectator functions in online games.

This is vintage Microsoft, claiming an excellent, existing idea as their own. Spectator mode is not new. Players of online shoot 'em ups like Doom and Unreal Tournament have been able to do that for decades.

But an observer mode that allows pans, cuts, and other devices common to filmed sports (and film in general for that matter), however, must be novel, right?

Well...

No less than the US Government has been working on this for some years. Replayable after-action reviews, complete with cueing, annotation, and varying camera angles, are already being developed for a number of military simulation games.

However the patent spaghetti sorts out, those behind this idea are undeniably onto something. The US may not have the spectator-gamer culture of Asia (yet), but making games viewable and accessible to people who want to watch instead of play -- or want to watch as a precursor to playing -- is an important and compelling expansion of the player pyramid:

    -Hardcore-
  ---Engaged---
 ----Casual-----
-----Observers----- 

There are lots more folks at the bottom of this pyramid, just as there are millions more people who watch professional football than attend live games or play.

The gamers at the top of the pyramid, the scary-dedicated ones, are really good at what they do, and watching them is fun. I'd much rather see two elite Battlefield 2 squads go at it then get my n00b azz mortared as soon as I log in.

And I'll never live to see the high-level content on World of Warcraft in person, but it'd sure be fun to watch some level 60 players romp through it. Those EQ and WoW raid videos are popular for a reason. Leeeeroy!

The Lighter Side of Hell

Because I don't want to go into the weekend on a grumpy note over that CDC nonsense, here's some Friday goofiness.

This World of Warcraft as text adventure piece is both hilarious and alarmingly accurate.

And who doesn't like mean cats? Be sure to read the captions.

Elf Needs Lobbyist, Badly

Let's see, the bird flu is coming, obesity is on the rise in children, and New Orleans is awash in contaminated ground sediment, so what do Senators Lieberman, Clinton, and other bipartisan supporters want to task the CDC with?

An exhaustive study on the "impact of electronic media use."

The CDC?!

Videogames and movies don't make me want to go postal. But ill-informed political posturing?

The misappropriation of an agency who, frankly, has bigger and more lethal fish to fry?

The first step of anti-videogame legislation (because, let's face it, that's what this is about, not movies or cell phones) masquerading as research?

Those make the IGDA, the ACLU, and the angel puppies cry.

Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's... a Methodist!

From the Too Much Free Time Department comes an exhaustive list of comic book characters and their religious affiliations.

For extra fun, check out the catalog's visual reference. The most pathetic supergroup has to be the Legion of Lutheran Superheroes, which consists of Mastodon and, um, Jimmy Olsen.

Orchestrating Gold

The LA Times has an interesting article on how CRASH won Best Picture.

No crazy conspiracy theories here, just careful research and marketing by Lionsgate, who treated the race for the Academy Awards' top bauble like a political campaign.

CRASH won, the article asserts, because the right people saw it, specifically LA-based actors and editors, two key voting blocs.

The network effect also comes into play: Paul Haggis and the movie's large cast have been in the business for a long time, with associated relationships and friend-of-friending.

Relationships alone won't guarantee a vote, but word of mouth is perhaps the most powerful type of marketing. I'd wager that World of Warcraft is the first of such games for many millions of its players, who got into the game because a friend recommended they try it out.

Of course, no one's going to vote for a movie they think is terrible, even if it is set in LA, highlights actors, and a friend recommended it. Lots of people didn't like CRASH, but lots did, and Lionsgate made a strategic effect to connect to those lots.

Those 130,000 screeners, a joke in some circles when they came out, seem much less foolish in the cold hard light of post-Oscar March. The CRASH DVD was at #3 on Amazon when last I looked.

Oscar, Warmed-Over

The Boyfriend and I visited Hollywood and Highland on Saturday to see the preparations, which was pretty nifty. The carpet is pinker than it appears on TV, and the swooshy faux-deco set pieces fronting the enclosed tent (security check? Car wash?) far more chintzy looking.

Yes, the Oscars are held in a mall. They hide it all remarkably well on TV, but directly above the grand, gold-swathed entryway you can grab a plate of nachos before you hit the Sunglass Hut.

Various young, apple-cheeked show workers were snapping the occasional picture of each other in front of giant Oscar statues, which I found endearing. Even if you're on the other side of the velvet rope, it must still be pretty magical.

The techie-roadie-Teamster types were rather less enthralled. A par can is a par can, no matter whose boobs it's lighting up.

What impressed me the most at the Kodak Theater was the incredible cross-section of onlookers who were crowding the area, both American and international. The movies this year may not be the mass market's bread and butter, but glamour and celebrity clearly are compelling and evergreen to a wide swath of humanity.

I was going to live-blog the Oscars for all three of my readers, but between errands and squeezing in a song or two on Guitar Hero I ended up TiVo-speedwatching the whole thing.

The masses of people at Trader Joe's were either doing the same thing, or -- gasp! -- did not care that the Oscars were unfolding mere miles away while they bought their Two-Buck Chuck.

Onto the show itself...

So CRASH won Best Picture. I can't say I'm not disappointed.

I need to see CRASH again -- I first watched it on a laptop on a plane, admittedly not ideal viewing conditions -- but while I thought it contained some strong scenes and performances, I found it overall manipulative, safe, and too redolent of movies that came before such as MAGNOLIA and SHORT CUTS.

Okay, many movies are manipulative, but I find CRASH's flavor really hard to watch, because it's full of a pervading sense of menace that finally erupts to destroy the person who least deserves it. I knew who the redshirt would be by his second scene, the poor bastard.

And yes, safe. The message? Racism is bad. What's risky about that?

And while the movie poses a challenge to the viewer, it doesn't offer any suggestions or solutions either, and precious little hope, other than to contrive to get yourself into a charged conflict with someone of another race and therefore Come To an Understanding. Either that or hug your housekeeper.

That's another thing: there's a slight whiff of the misogynistic about CRASH. The female characters are all either one-note racial sketches, bitchy, and/or victims of personal violence.

I do think time will vindicate BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, as well as the bumper crop of other excellent movies from 2005 like CAPOTE and THE CONSTANT GARDENER.

Other notes on the night:

Jon Stewart was fine but not nearly as funny as he can be (a Bjork/Cheney joke? Dusty stuff). Loved the attack ads, though.

Huh. The orchestra is playing that go away music as the winner starts to speak. That sound you hear is Oscar peeing on your special moment, kids!

Yay! Go Rachel Weisz! A great character in a great movie. Way to leave that THE MUMMY RETURNS stink behind.

Amy Adams was also amazing -- go rent JUNEBUG right now -- but she'll have more chances, I've no doubt.

Can George Clooney really be that classy and charming and politically aware? Gads, I hope so. And I hope the cloning people start with him.

Naomi Watts' dress looked like a manic badger was set loose on it.

Holy cats, did those interpretive dancers just recreate the assault scene from CRASH during the Best Song performance? Kill me now.

I didn't know Tim Burton was dating Elizabeth Taylor.

Sucked for him and the Wallace and Gromit guys, stuck in the cheap seats by the sound board.

Were Keanu's eyes always that teeny-tiny?

Hated Charlize's look. Like Brigitte Bardot being attacked by someone's home ec project.

Meryl Streep's intro of Robert Altman with Lily Tomlin went on too long (we get it, already, it's Altmanesque), but they were gracious and looked fabulous. Terrific dress on Meryl.

My inner snark was kind of hoping that Altman would unleash a little on Hollywood, an establishment he's famously been at odds with for many years, but he took the high road, as befits one of our greatest directors.

Jessica Alba needs a sandwich.

When will they abandon that horrible creepy-cheesy moment when the animated characters du jour "appear" onstage to present an award? Stop. Just stop.

The stuffed penguins were cute, and the movie was lovely, but MURDERBALL should've won best doc.

Yay! Cleaned-up pimp song rocks the house, despite yet more sketchy interpretive dancing. Seriously, I thought there was a moratorium on that stuff.

See, Larry McMurtry is a writer. He's in jeans.

And in closing, what is up with all the gum-chewing? Half the stars they showed in cutaways were chomping like Holsteins.

Get some class, Hollywood. We're watching. Well, except the mob at Trader Joe's.

The Greatest Game Never Made?

The rumors are true! There really was an unreleased Penn & Teller Sega game. Smoke and Mirrors is (was? Would have been?) a collection of postmodern minigames in the inimitable P&T style.

Chief among them is the fabled Desert Bus, in which you drive a bus across the Nevada desert to Las Vegas-- in real time. Make the 16 hour roundtrip, the legend goes, and you score one point.

Screenshots, commentary, and a torrent for the brave on Something Awful's forums.

MATCH POINT

I'm probably going to writer hell for this (what would that be, I wonder? Nonstop screenings of Joe Eszterhas movies?), but I didn't love MATCH POINT.

Not bad, just meh. But the Woody Allen of THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, ZELIG, and of course MANHATTAN and ANNIE HALL is (or was) certainly capable of more than meh.

And he owes us more after inflicting CELEBRITY on us.

SPOILERS and blather follow.

The questions MATCH POINT raises are interesting: what would (or wouldn't) we do to protect what we've worked hard to achieve? What is really important in life, comfort or passion? Does love stop being love when it becomes inconvenient?

Unfortunately, these questions are voiced through dialogue that struck me as merely pedestrian. Joyless, missing that Allen wit. Characters speak exactly what's on their minds, with no hint of subtext. Worse, too many lines clunk awkwardly when they fall from the lips of the very pretty Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson.

I loved most of the character portraits, everyone layered and real and flawed, and Allen definitely knows how to make a loathsome guy still somehow sympathetic (Exhibit A, Sean Penn's jerk of a jazz guitarist in SWEET AND LOWDOWN), but Rhys Meyers' amoral social climber Chris is a sullen cipher, who tells us too much of who he is and shows us too little.

I kept expecting the way in which he plays tennis -- as the title indicates, the game's both a key plot element to the story and its central metaphor -- to reflect some of his ambition, ruthlessness, or manipulative nature.

One moment that does work is Chris' callous pretense of being on a cancelled vacation to avoid his hysterical mistress Nola. Why not give us more of those actions, and cut back on the "I have a very comfortable life with my wife that would be ruined if I left her for my pregnant girlfriend" spoken obviousness?

And why did we, after seeing the movie almost entirely through Chris' eyes, have to take a left turn and spend scenes with the not-suspicious-enough detectives? Why the clumsy ghostly confrontation--OOPS! It's a DREAM! And not even his dream, or the dream of anyone we've spent any time with.

Some of that just feels lazy. I like the sneaky reappearance of the neighbor's wedding ring, but what about Nola's coworker? She knows Nola's seeing someone ("Is it him?" she asks when Chris calls Nola to set her up for the murder), and appears to know about her situation. Wouldn't the police talk to her?

Maybe it's not fair to lay procedural mistakes at Allen's doorstep, since the movie isn't really about murder, but the movie begs it by shifting abruptly into crime drama territory and its important tiny details.

At the end of the day, I liked this movie better when it was CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. Or, for that matter, A PLACE IN THE SUN.

For this rehash, truly original movies like HUSTLE & FLOW and JUNEBUG -- which crackle with dialogue that's both realistic and lyrical, and which leave so much deliciously unsaid -- got shut out of a nom?

The Academy sure does love them some Woody. I did too, once.

Stuck? Clean Out the Catbox

Kitty gets a fresh place to crap and you may just find your scene.

Lemme 'splain. Ever have an exchange like this?

RANDOM PERSON: So, you're a writer.

ME: What? Did the scotch and social awkwardness give me away?

(Pause while Random Person tries to figure out if I'm kidding. I am not.)

RANDOM PERSON: Where do you get your ideas?

ME: Uh, in the shower?

The question asked is about content not context, of course, and we all have different sources for the muse inside our crazy crazy brains.

But I'm fascinated at how often ideas hit when I'm working out, drying my hair, or washing dishes.

I problem-solve tactically at the computer, at the foxhole level, stitching up story holes, tweaking dialogue, and whatnot.

But for big inspiration? Ideas for entire new scripts or knotty, large-scale challenges like how to rebuild a weak protagonist? More often than not those hit when I'm nowhere near that tyrant blank page. Say, folding laundry.

There must be something about how the noisy mind shuts down for these rote physical tasks that lets the remaining synapses churn away, burning background cycles. For me at least. And anything like going for a jog that helps mitigate Writer's Ass and gives a creative boost is an angel puppy in my book.

How about you? When or how do you get your ideas?

Meet Me at Arcadian Noodle

A little Friday silliness: some lunatic anagrammed all the stations on London's tube map.

Half of them sound like Edward Gorey place names. New Queasy! Stoutening Honks!

I've been to the half-price theater ticket booth in Queerer Elastics many a time.

Whoop That Trick

The US chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project is calling upon consumers to boycott Grand Theft Auto.

GTA, the whores claim, is morally questionable.

Yes, players can beat and kill virtual hookers in the game (but not rape anyone, as wrongly noted by SWOP).

You also can do the same to virtual cops, gangsters, ice cream salesmen, little old ladies, and innocent passersby.

We're waiting for the Frozen Dessert Servers Coalition to release a statement expressing concern about the game's cost to the morality and socialization of children, for whom the game was not created nor to whom it legally can be sold, any more than, say, RESERVOIR DOGS.

In the meantime, cheer with me: Down with G-T-A! Have you saved a ho today?

Happy Valentine's Day, Pass the Gin

Ken Levine's got a nice post on the true nature of love. Hint: it doesn't involve mass produced, low grade chocolate or ugly-ass heart-shaped jewelry.

Speaking from the distaff side, mostly we don't want the stupid Valentine's Day stuff. It's just as much a fabricated, consumerist trap for us as for you, except we have to wear uncomfortable undies.

What we want is to be in the room when you watch the Mets (read, Cubs).

When I think of aspirational screen couples, Nick and Nora Charles are right up there at the top of the list. Sassy, sweet, wholly unrealistic and marvelous. While The Boyfriend and I are short on glamour and have solved hardly any murders, both of us can make a killer martini. That's a start.

Here's another reprint from my movie column from Oxygen's (alas, now-defunct) Girls on Film site, about Dashiell Hammett's classic twosome.

---

THIN MEN

Chill those cocktail glasses! Here come Myrna Loy and William Powell, the immortal Nick and Nora Charles of the THIN MAN series. This sophisticated pair has survived plenty, including a disastrous Broadway musical and the rather overextended run of their own franchise. The last of the 6 THIN MAN movies came out 13 years after the first -- oof -- and the quality of the writing deteriorated sharply once the writers ran out of Dashiell Hammett source material. And -- I'm going out on an un-PC limb here -- the movies aren't nearly as much fun when tippling Nick dries out. Plus Nick Jr. comes along, yawn (fun fact: a pre-BLUE VELVET Dean Stockwell plays li'l Nicky).

Here are the first, and best, two of the flicks featuring filmdom's favorite flatfoot couple.

The whodunit of THE THIN MAN (1934), by today's mind-warping, THE USUAL SUSPECTS-type standards, is almost comically tidy in the way that it trots out all the, well, usual suspects. Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a successful, paranoid, divorced inventor. In the first half-hour we meet everyone who might wish Wynant ill, from the shifty bookkeeper to his greedy mistress to his even greedier ex-wife. Wynant then promptly vanishes, and his daughter Dorothy (Maureen O'Sullivan) goes to family friend Nick Charles for help.

We see Nick taking the first of many, many drinks in the film, teaching some bartenders how to make a proper martini. Nora enters, towed by the terrier Asta, and soon catches up with him, to the tune of 6 martinis. Yow. Nora wants Nick to take the Wynant case: he protests he married her, and her money, to get out of the detecting game.

There's such an easy chemistry between Loy and Powell that you wonder if the occasional mugging or physical comedy was ad-libbed and kept in the final cut. They deliver breezy dialogue with impeccable timing: Nick mistily muses, "We're all like that on my father's side." Nora: "And how is your father's side?" Nick: "Much better, thank you. How's yours?" Loy is beautiful and elegant, and Powell manages somehow to be kind of sexy even though he's got no chin to speak of. Nick is supposed to have a tough-guy background, but, as played by Powell, the toughest Nick ever had it was getting cut from the Exeter lacrosse team.

The absent Wynant is accused of killing his mistress. More murders get pinned on him as the police search high and low, while Nick and Nora piece together the facts. The end of the film is fairly absurd, as they throw a fancy dinner party for all the suspects. Nick pins a case on everyone until the real murderer cracks. Hard to imagine Simone and Sipowicz flipping a suspect this way, but hey, in 1934, it seemed to work.

1936's AFTER THE THIN MAN brings us to Nick and Nora's chichi digs in San Francisco, on New Year's Eve. Rather than getting to hang out with the quite un-respectable souses who've invaded for a "surprise" bash, our heroes have to go to the Most Boring Party Ever. Hosted by Nora's battle-axe aunt, who looks like Ed Wynn in drag, the party is an excuse to get Nick to inquire discreetly after cousin Selma's (Elissa Landis) straying nogoodnik husband.

The husband might as well have a red bulls-eye painted on his chest, so many people want him dead for so many reasons. And die he does. Was it the trampy singer? Her gangster boyfriend? Cesar Romero? There's a fatally important mustache, many cocktails, and Jimmy Stewart. The movie ends with another improbable gathering of the clans, Nick addressing the peanut gallery until the truth comes out.

Sure, there's murders up the wazoo, but the world of these movies, even when dealing with the rougher element, seems so... civilized. Even ex-cons and thugs wear coat and tie, and rise when introduced to a lady. And detecting looks like much more fun when you have an alluring husband/wife and a highball in hand.

The rest of THIN MAN line:

Another Thin Man (1939)
Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)
The Thin Man Goes Home (1944)
Song of the Thin Man (1947)

So why not pick up a couple and make up a batch of martinis, recipe from Philip Collins' book The Art of the Cocktail:

1/2 - 1 oz. dry vermouth
2 oz. dry gin
Shake well with ice and strain into martini glass. Add olive.

Serve with quips and raised eyebrow. Drink 6 in a row, darlings, and you'll get what you deserve. Cheers!

I Wish I Knew How to Alt-F4 You

Some enterprising soul has created BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN skins for The Sims 2 .

Green-diamond Ennis and Jack to happiness at last! And no, that's not a euphemism.

Plane Jane

Just back from a quick trip to Vancouver. One row in front of me on the plane sat a braying drunk girl and her slightly less drunk guy best friend? Boyfriend? Booty call buddy?

Unclear, because she made much about getting married to someone else in March, and yet all but had her hands down 17B's pants one and and a half screwdrivers into the flight. The other half ended up spilled on the floor in a fit of honking and snorting that I think was laughter.

Both came on board plowed and the subsequent vodka didn't help matters any. I can tell the guy was less lit than she was because he kept shushing her as she cursed a loud and voluble blue streak. Kids were just three seats away.

If it was Mardi Gras and there were beads to be had, girlfriend's tank top would've been up around her Tweetybird neck tattoo. Just that classy.

But I didn't mind the shenanigans, because I had John August and Jordan Mechner's nifty pilot OPS, in all its permutations, to read.

If you haven't read them, John's files are a goldmine, showing not just what another beat sheet format looks like, but also outlines, and how a script can evolve through development hell-- erm, process.

The episodes are all good, of course, but I prefer the Iraq story. Just seems tighter, more suspenseful, with higher stakes that impact more on the human level.

One minor quibble from the peanut gallery was that I wanted the refrigerator unit breaking to come out of character or situation, and not be arbitrary. Maybe Vanowen was rushing away from the checkpoint, annoyed at McGinty's fine, hit a bump, and it cracked. Or the truck was something McGinty procured, and to save money he ended up with a lemon.

If the generosity of sharing these materials wasn't enough, John also wrote up the illuminating tale of the life and (living?) death of the show.

A pity it stalled out -- would've been a surefire TiVo Season Pass.

Stick a Fork In It

(the screenplay format was messing up the sidebar, so I removed it)

Done!

The new feature script I began in January to finish by the end of February is done, with three and a half weeks to spare.

Last time I posted an update was about two and half weeks ago, when I had a complete outline. Sort of a long time between updates, but for a secular humanist I have an ornery superstitious streak and didn't want to post how things were going.

They went well. I averaged about five pages an hour.

Better still, those hours passed in that delightful, timeless flow state we get when we're creating, if we're lucky. About as good as it gets, isn't it?

A few methods I use, for those interested in craft details (if you're not, go look at something cute):

1) Fairly detailed character bios
2) Beat sheet outline format
3) Stopping for the day when things were going well, and before beginning a scene I felt confident about

Between #1 and #2, at no time was I stuck on a scene or at a loss for what the characters would say. In fact, they often surprised me. One turned out to be a Dodgers fan, the bitch. Who knew?

#3 is a trick attributed to Hemingway. It's a great feeling, being excited about getting back to the story rather than worrying that there's no gas in the tank.

A note about #2. I've always believed in outlining, but for features have had trouble finding a format that works for me. Standard outline form reminds me too much of school term papers. Writing the story in full prose feels too heavyweight. Index cards have never rung my bell, because my handwriting is terrible and I think (and type) much faster than I can print.

I've found TV scripts easier to write (I finished one of those in January as well), mostly because I wrote the pages from a beat sheet format.

On a typical beat sheet, you work out the entire plot scene by scene, building toward the act outs. Some writers describe the scene in prose, some in just a few words. Mine tend to be brief stream-of-consciousness fragments.

Here are a few examples from my CSI spec:

INT. MEDICAL EXAMINERS’ ROOM - DAY

Yes, she was hanged (petechiae). Ligature marks confirm. OJ. Toxicology shows Vicodin, and that she likely had an addiction. Hair smells of cigarette smoke. “Uh, you two want a private moment?” Secrets.

EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Police there. Hank covered in blood. Confessing. Has gun still. People watching outside. Kids. Helen pulls them back. CSIs note this.

INT. HOUSE – DAY

Catherine and Sara walk through the house, imagining the shooting. Celia dead in the yard, three gunshots.

FLASHBACK of shooting

INT. HALLWAY – DAY

Daniel arrives. Distraught. Fought with Trish the last time he saw her.

Features don't have act outs exactly (or do, depending on what school of thought you may subscribe to), but do have internal structures to build around.

And it's a fluid format. One scene may expand to several, or get rearranged, or vanish altogether if the story requires. But the bones are there.

Just a few lines. A high-level view of where the scene takes place, what needs to happen in it, tonal notes, maybe a snippet of dialogue. But from such bits does a final script grow.

As for my new script, it gets to bake a week or two before facing the rewrite knives. Not for nothing are we told -- again by Hemingway -- that the first draft of anything is crap.

Now Playing on a Computer Near You

A couple of interesting tidbits in Business Week about James Cameron and Ron Howard conceiving MMOGs to go along with upcoming TV and film projects.

My first thought is that these guys, admirable filmmakers both, have no fucking clue what they're getting into.

The rampaging success of World of Warcraft (and EQ before it) has lit up dollar signs in a lot of eyes, but a painful reality check awaits those unfamiliar with MMOG development.

These games are hard to build. Much harder than making a movie or a TV show, and they take a lot longer.

Imagine making a movie where the script is never finished, the actors count in the thousands, don't know their lines, or ever hit their marks. Many badmouth you publicly and some even actively try to sabotage your production. Oh, and you're trying to invent the camera and projection equipment as you go.

Going with a middleware company might sound good on paper, but integration with a platform rather than homegrowing your own has its own, significant problems, and there has not yet been a AAA title built on such a middleware package.

The elements that make a movie compelling by and large don't work in a virtual world: a single authored narrative, a small set of characters or even just a single main character, and, duh, an ending.

Virtual worlds, Diablo-like hybrids like Guild Wars aside, comprise not a single story handed down from on high but multiple mini-stories (quests), which are largely window dressing for the more compelling, dynamic, and utterly uncontrollable player narratives. Everyone's a hero. And the stories don't end.

If I had to guess, these games will be less like MMOGs as we know them and more like Halo or Diablo, smaller-scale spaces with limited ways to interact with and impact the world. Which might be fine. Who wants to be a crafter in Terminator Online?

But why the warning bells, you ask? Building and marketing a fictional world based on a popular media property's got to be a no-fail, multimillion-player bet, right?

Star Wars Galaxies, anyone?

Matrix Online?

Bueller?

Actually, a MMOG based on FERRIS might be kinda fun...

Shrub

Did I miss something, or did Bush last night compare himself and the morass in Iraq to Lincoln and the end to slavery, the Greatest Generation and WWII, and -- holy weeping angel puppies -- Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement?

What a knob.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure all of those people could pronounce "nuclear" correctly.

But my favorite bit comes from FOH (Friend of Hell) Dr. Gori, who quotes the Prez:

"A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids..." [emphasis and incredulous eye-rolling mine]

Well, damn. There goes the mermaid vote.

Golda Meir Pwns U, N00b

Maybe what doomed the Atari E.T. game was not crappy design, greed, or corporate hubris, but the fact that the movie, as good as it was, wasn't a Best Picture nominee!

(Oh, wait.)

(Guess it was crappy design, greed, and corporate hubris after all.)

Set Your TiVo for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

What should I espy squirreled inside a block of house ads on the Sundance Channel (bless 'em, does that channel have anything but house ads?) but a promo for Season 2 of SLINGS AND ARROWS, the delicious Canadian series about the certifiables at a Shakespeare festival.

It's airing in February. Huzzah and hey-nonny-nonny!

Hey, It Was a Busy Fall

Jumping on an idiotic bandwagon months after it leaves East Moron? Sign us up, says the city of Los Angeles, which this week filed suit against Take-Two Interactive over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

In other news, the city of Los Angeles today dispatched a flotilla of rubber dinghies to New Orleans to help "those poor souls stranded on their rooftops."

Okay, So You Miss a Sauced Paris Hilton Barfing into a Main Street Snowbank

Holy after-party, Batman, my assistant forgot to courier me my Sundance tickets!

Of course, I don't have Sundance tickets.

Or an assistant.

But I have TiVo and the internets!

Can't make it up to Park City this year? Technology to the rescue, baby.

The Sundance Channel is airing daily reports chock full of interviews, day-in-the-life video journals, and goofy man in the street interviews. Especially funny is host Whitney Cummings' attempts to scam her way into parties and swag. That girl's got mad griftin' skillz.

Blogging Sundance has several reporters in the field. Check out their film reviews and news on who's buying what, plus random articles and party reports.

For minimum content and maximum snark -- and pictures! -- visit Defamer, who's dispatched cranky, funny editor Mark Lisanti to the snowy slopes.

Best of all, with this stuff you can be part of the scene from the comfort of your own home, while wearing clothes no sane human being would wear in public, let alone to a major film festival. Or, would.

Some of the Stuff I Saw in Grad School Was No Better

Who needs film school? You only need a Flickr feed, some random zooms and cuts, and an arty soundtrack to create a buzzworthy visual tone poem! Look out, Sundance!

An interesting use of technology. Brings up Eisenstein- and Kuleshov-type questions about our brain's extraction of meaning and narrative from sequential images.

Is a film still pretentious if it's an algorithm that's directing?

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

Certain shelves are groaning with statuettes, with more to come. Random thoughts and SPOILERS ahoy.

I can tell I liked BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN because it's stayed with me, the memory of it sort of deepening and melding over time.

DONNIE DARKO was another film that had this lingering effect, so maybe it's just a Jake jones.

I knew Heath Ledger had this in him from his tiny but shattering role in MONSTER'S BALL, and of course Jake has proven chops. But former lightweights Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams? Damn.

Michelle may seem to have the meatier role, with Anne hidden behind adding machines and big Texas hair for most of the movie, but just watch girlfriend go in the phone call scene where she tells Ennis of Jack's death. Subtle work from an unlikely quarter.

It takes no small amount of skill to craft a short story (and it is short) into a feature length screenplay as Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana did, even if Mr. McMurtry is grumpy about computers. Did hieroglyphic scribes bitch about the "dry embrace" of papyrus?

Much of the best dialogue was retained from Annie Proulx's story. "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it." Jack's spotlight "I wish I knew how to quit you" speech, lifted wholesale. Many interior thoughts appear onscreen as spoken lines.

The movie fleshes out Jack's story in particular, adding more about Lureen and her father. The latter scenes form an interesting counterpoint and foundation for when you later meet Jack's own father, and glimpse that stunted relationship.

The story says right out that Jack's ashes were never going back to Brokeback Mountain, but the movie doesn't need to. You just know.

I don't think the waitress subplot works. Ennis is damaged when she meets him, and the movie doesn't illustrate why she falls in love with this broken, closed-off man. For his part, she's a convenience, maybe even a bit of a beard. She's just a one-liner in the short story.

Amazing visuals throughout, from the gorgeous, wild "Wyoming" (see comments) countryside to its threadbare prairie towns.

While the reappearance of the shirts is a standout of the film -- a classic emotional gutpunch -- the story handles their backstory a bit better. Because it's prose, you can learn when you see the shirts that Ennis lost his back on the mountain.

In the film, Heath says as they leave, "I can't believe I forgot my shirt," which rankled me as an archetypal tell.

Why not show the shirt, forgotten at the campsite, as they pack? Or show Ennis rooting in his knapsack in the truck, not finding it?

Of course, Larry and Diana have been presented awards on TV and I haven't, so what do I know.

Love that Ennis re-hangs the shirts at the end, putting his outside Jack's, protective and enveloping.

Another great metaphor? The corraling of Ennis's spirit into smaller and smaller spaces, from mountainside to shabby house to small apartment to tiny trailer. Will this guy ever be happy again? Can he be?

I'm of two minds on the added scenes with Ennis' daughter. The sentimentalist in me appreciates the addition of a thread that shows that Ennis still can connect with another human being, and that offers some hope for him. But that hope is not present in the short story, and seems a little dishonest for his character.

Who thinks Ennis actually went to his daughter's wedding?

Hell-Bent for Leather Update

At the beginning of this year, I set a goal for myself to finish a new feature script by the end of February. Of course, the NaNoWriMo folks are making me look like a slacker for compressing a writing timeline into a fortnight, the ambitious bastards.

Well, after a few hours at The Office this weekend, I now have a full outline of HBFL (that's the mindset, not the script's title) and will be ready to get into pages shortly.

I liked The Office, once I got past the minor absurdity of paying six bucks an hour for the privilege of sitting in someone's storefront. The place is nicely appointed, hushed as a library, with comfy Aeron chairs and Bose noise-canceling headphones. Those things are magic. I was sitting right next to a quietly burbling fountain and homeboy got canceled. Not a burble.

Gamer Love

If you and your sugarpie aren't in the same guild, your evenings may go a little something like this.

Give It Up for Johnny on the Synths

Scott the Reader recently replied to Fun Joel's scribosphere questionnaire with another, a suggestion to list a favorite line of dialogue that you've written.

Here's one of mine:

(Holding up index finger) "I can count on one finger the number of conversations I've had with them since I moved out. And it's not this finger."

Clever, I think. I think it's clever enough that I'm starting to wonder if I may not have written it, but that I picked it up somewhere, unwittingly internalized it, and spat it back out again as my own.

It should be noted that I'm paranoid.

But I fear this because it's happened once before, in rehearsal for one of my plays.

DIRECTOR: You know that's a line from SIXTEEN CANDLES.

ME: What? Where?

The director describes the scene. I remember it.

ME: Well, shit.

Writers, especially screenwriters who are by their very nature media hounds, are all about synthesizing their experience of the world, absorbing and combining bits and pieces of what they see and hear and learn and feeding that into what they create.

From KING KONG to SHREK to SCRUBS, which recently contained a throwaway DEADWOOD reference, conscious quotations and homages both verbal and visual are on the rise. Also, too, are the unconscious ones, as the creators of these texts (Warning! Warning! Literary criticism term off the port bow!) exhibit through their work more and more of the media and information saturation that's part of our modern lives.

Is this a problem? Maybe. I don't think any of us look forward to the day when a TV show or movie is nothing but lazy quotes of stuff that came before.

Pause for laughter.

Yeah, that's already happened, lots of times. So let's buck the trend.

Examining your work with a critical eye helps. So does making sure you're feeding your brain with books and music and art and nature and current events and travel in addition to what can be TiVo'd. But synthesized observation is part and parcel of what it means to be a creative person.

Of course, there's a point at which "synthesized observation" becomes "plagiarism." Anyone, um, recognize that finger line?

Failing Gracefully

"M.A.D." is a standout Season 1 episode of the universally excellent VERONICA MARS.

A girl wants to dump her abusive boyfriend. The dilemma she's in: the boyfriend roofied her at a party once, and has incriminating, raunchy video of her that he will post online if she leaves him. He's not interested when Veronica approaches him about playing nice, and gambits to retrieve the video go nowhere.

Finally, with no other choice, Veronica arms the girl with potent ammo of her own. The boyfriend's a homophobe. Veronica mocks up a website that looks like a love letter he's created to another guy. The girls threaten to release this to his friends and the Naval Academy, his dream school, if he publishes the video. This is the Mutually Assured Destruction of the ep's title.

And?

It doesn't work.

The jerk releases the video and the girl is humiliated.

She does not retaliate with the website, being a better person than he (and arguably better than Veronica, who would've fired back with both barrels not to mention coming up with the idea in the first place).

Veronica, smart, capable Veronica, failed. And this makes her more interesting. More accessible, more human.

Of all the episodes of CSI and COLD CASE that I've seen (and that would be all of them), some of the ones that stick most in my memory are the ones where the bad guy gets away or someone screws up. Where, due to circumstance or error, our heroes just can't bring the case across the finish line.

It doesn't happen often, and shouldn't. These aren't the Keystone Kops, after all. But the occasional setback helps ground the show in some semblance of reality -- shit happens to us all -- offers rich character opportunities, and keeps the stakes interesting.

In a serialized drama, failure is almost a necessity. Speaking of diverging from reality, I nearly gave up on PRISON BREAK early on when things kept going so swimmingly for Michael.

But when things started going wrong, they got interesting. Losing his toes? Groovy. Stuck with psycho T-bag in on the plan? Fabulous.

This is true of more than TV, of course. Beyond the expected twists and reversals of a well-plotted story, movies who put failure at their center can really be something special.

A heist movie is a heist movie, right? But have the scheme go south and you get the spare, heartbreaking A SIMPLE PLAN.

There's a whole subgenre of compelling, inspiring sports movies where The Good Guy Loses, because winning the big game is not what those stories -- ROCKY, TIN CUP, MURDERBALL -- are really about.

Tom Cruise in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE is a crashing bore because the cat. Can. Do. No. Wrong. How much more watchable is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE FUGITIVE, or AIR FORCE ONE? Give me Harrison Ford getting beat up and left for dead, any day.

Memed!

Tagged, I'm it! Fun Joel started this scribosphere meme and Shawna handed it along to me. Here goes:

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:

Drive-in double feature of BUGSY MALONE and THE BAD NEWS BEARS.

TWO (2) favorite lines from movies:

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
ALL ABOUT EVE

"Wallace Beery. Wrestling picture. What do you need, a roadmap?"
BARTON FINK

THREE (3) jobs you'd do if you could not work in the "biz":

(I'm including theater in biz, and excluding it here)
Librarian
Astronomer
Computer programmer

Could I be any more of a girlgeek?

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside the industry:

Concessionaire at art house movie theater (I guess this is a little industry-related)
Drama teacher (um, this too)
Sandwich maker
Campus recycling center serf (hard, stinky work. Left the next quarter to work the multimedia desk at the liberry)

THREE (3) book authors I like:

Michael Chabon
George R. R. Martin
Barbara Ehrenreich

TWO (2) movies you'd like to remake or properties you'd like to adapt:

SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! - Little known 1943 movie about WWII combat nurses in the Pacific, starring Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake in the performance of her career. Harrowing and gritty, and a welcome reminder that the Greatest Generation wasn't all guys.

"Doom Patrol" - Grant Morrison's run of this comic book is straight-up absurdy stuff. Superheroes in need of thorazine and a hug. Dark, funny, and probably completely unfilmable.

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated:

Paul Weitz. I just watched IN GOOD COMPANY. This and ABOUT A BOY are about as poignant, funny, and authentic dramas as I've seen, featuring shaded, complex portraits of men trying to become more themselves.

THREE (3) people I'm tagging to answer this meme next:

Bill, Ras, and Shawn.

KING KONG

Finally saw it. I'm with Ken Levine on this one. Peter Jackson shows distressing signs of an incipient case of George Lucas Disease.

Both are great filmmakers and proven storytellers who need to have their hands slapped when reaching for the Bigger is Better cookie jar too often.

KING KONG sports better dialogue than Episodes Crap through Crud (note that it's hard to do worse than "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo, when all we had was our love.") but the movie is just as bloated and reliant on oddly ponderous action scenes that feel like levels in the videogame, not integral sequences that evolve the story.

Random thoughts and SPOILERS follow.

Why show just one uber-T. Rex when you can show three?

Why spend two minutes showing the ship neeeeeeearly crashing on the rocks when you can show ten?

Why invent a few kinds of horrible bugs when you can throw a dozen concept designs at the screen?

Uh, because it's boring and dilutes impact?

The Shelob scenes in THE RETURN OF THE KING were far scarier than KONG's bug pit. JURASSIC PARK's single T. rex and mere three raptors created much more memorable, iconic set pieces (Ack! They can open doors!). I saw KONG yesterday and already am forgetting what chase happened when.

The ancient town looked pretty cool, sort of like Osgiliath, post-orc renovation.

Did we need the dinosaur bungee cord scene?

Another successful motion capture performance by Andy Serkis. Most of the emotional resonance in the movie came from the saddest, biggest digitized monkey in the world.

Naomi Watts did a nice job considering that 80% of her screen time is looking in horror at something out of frame.

While I appreciate the nifty twist of having the bookish writer be the hero, I don't know of any playwrights who can rappel down mountains, stunt drive, or wrangle oversize bats. Well, maybe Lillian Hellman, but that's it.

Product placement is somehow cute and quaint when it's period. I hate that I think this.

Plot threads are left dangling like dinosaur bungee cords. What happens to the weaselly actor at the end? And what made him un-weasel back on the island and come back to help save everyone in the bug pit?

Why waste our time with scenes setting up the Little Jimmy subplot then give it no resolution?

And maybe I'm looking for too tidy or modern a wrap-up, but why doesn't Jack Black's Wellesian movie producer come to realize that he's the architect of all this havoc? Why not let him understand how much he's destroyed, and the price of his egotism?

Yes, I know "Beauty killed the beast" is a line from the 1933 original, but when Black intones it I wanted to scream, "It was you, you moron! Not to mention dozens of sailors, natives, and Depression-era extras. Get a good lawyer."

It's no small irony that Jackson appears in a cameo in one of the biplanes that sends the grand ape plummetting onto 34th Street.

Still, Ang Lee's pre-BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN project was THE HULK. I live in faith that PJ can keep his inner fanboy in check and let the story take the reins again.

Hell-Bent for Leather

I'm back from vacation, quads newly jellied by climbing about 176 Maya pyramids, and still bleary enough that I misread a label at the store on Tuesday and bought a bag of baby arugula instead of baby spinach. Arugula, which is Italian for "yuppie chump weeds," is expensive and bitter to the point of being painful. The first wife of lettuces.

So. The January question is, existing obligations aside, what to tackle writing-wise as the new year kicks off?

The goal: a new feature script by the end of February.

I'm not starting cold. I have a premise, character sketches, rough outline, handful of punchy moments, and a title, but that's it. Two months from early prep to first draft, the version I fondly call the crap draft.

Anyone else want to play?

Ready, set, go!

Scribosphere Movie Night?

Fun Joel got me thinking. We all like movies, we all like talking about movies. Would folks be into getting together to see one sometime, say something that's bubbling to the top this awards season? We could decamp afterwards for a tasty beverage and witty debate. Or maybe just the beverage.

Plenty of good choices: MUNICH, SYRIANA, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, MATCH POINT, THE RINGER. I kid.

What do you think?

Golden Apples, Oranges, Kumquats

Today the WGA announced its nominees for the best screenplays of 2005, the usual mixed bag cinematic buffet that reminds me to get out of the damn house to see some movies and/or stop filling my Netflix queue with well-intentioned, earnest, thoughtfully paced foreign films that I will never watch.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

CINDERELLA MAN, Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman, Story by Cliff Hollingsworth

CRASH, Screenplay by Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco, Story by Paul Haggis

THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, Written by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, Written by George Clooney & Grant Heslov

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, Written by Noah Baumbach

How nice to see a comedy in there! That Murrow guy was hilarious.


ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, Screenplay by Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, Based on the Short Story by Annie Proulx

CAPOTE, Screenplay by Dan Futterman, Based on the Book by Gerald Clarke

THE CONSTANT GARDENER, Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, Based on the Novel by John le Carré

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, Screenplay by Josh Olson, Based on the Graphic Novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke

SYRIANA, Written by Stephen Gaghan, Based on the Book "See No Evil" by Robert Baer

Cowboy-on-cowboy action will not be denied, people.